Premature Evacuation

Saturday, June 15

That low moan of relief you hear coming from Ankara is the sound of long-delayed satisfaction. Turkish PM Tayyip Erdoğan has been gritting his teeth for three weeks, thinking about what he should do to all of those free-love types taking over his future shopping center site. There was simply no way he was going to let those protesters stay much longer.

Events are unfolding as I write. In particular, pay attention to Beşiktaş, where people are already collecting.

Halk TV showing developments in Taksim and Beşiktaş

Some quick thoughts:

1) These were not violent protests, they were police riots. From beginning to end the protests in Istanbul and elsewhere appear to have been completely peaceful. Even last week, when a few people threw Molotov cocktails at police clearing Taksim Square, the organization (DSP) that was accused of throwing the cocktails immediately disassociated themselves with the act and claim the throwers were not their people.

Prior to this evening, meanwhile, hundreds of people, at least, had been injured in beatings they'd received from the police--these are not municipal bodies, but rather part of a national force directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ankara.

2) It's not just about the park. Yes, there have been some cute pieces posted over the past couple of weeks about the importance of public space, etc, in this conflict. But no--there's a lot more going on than just the park. In fact, pretending that this is just about the park--and limiting this discussion to one about who plants/cuts the most trees--fits in completely with the AKP narrative ("why riot over 3-5 trees? Erdoğan planted hundreds of thousands when he was mayor!"). This is really misleading.

People are protesting over a wide range of issues, including the recent passage of a law limiting alcohol sales, but in my opinion what has galvanized people most over the past sixteen days has been a combination of two issues: a) people getting gassed and having their heads cracked just because they dared to protest, and b) the fear of Erdogan that has been so clearly expressed by the silence of the great majority of the Turkish media. Even the AKP figures--President Abdullah Gül, Vice-Premier Bülent Arınç, Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbaş--who spoke out (while Erdoğan was in North Africa) in favor of a more moderate approach seem afraid of Erdoğan, having completely shut up since the PM returned from his trip abroad.

3) This is not (just) a religious-secularist issue, although my sense is it will ultimately be fed into that narrative, I think, within Turkey. Still, the issue is democracy, and people's right to protest. For the most part, people have been calling for Erdoğan's resignation, not that of the AKP. The apparent desire of Erdoğan to push this conflict to physical confrontation is what people consider totally appalling. Any political figure acting with this kind of attitude towards peaceful protesters today would have elicited this reaction in Turkey.

4) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a product of the Turkish Republic. Where did Erdoğan learn this kind of intolerance for political dissent? Remember, Erdoğan spent four months in prison for reading a poem by Ziya Gökalp. Lots of people were totally fine with that. Erdoğan saw his political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, get pushed out by the military in 1997, then effectively banned from politics for life. Many mainstream folks thought that was perfectly okay, too.

Yes, Erdoğan is ruthless, as anyone who has read my Ergenekon posts knows all too well. Were he not this ruthless, had he not been proactive in jailing his opponents, I doubt he would have lasted this long in power. By no means does this excuse his actions over the past sixteen days, or over the past several years. But it's also important to remember, as inconvenient as it may seem at this particular juncture, that this crisis has been a long, long time in the making--since way before the AKP was even formed.

Also important to remember is that people have been getting their heads cracked--and worse--in the southeast of Turkey for decades for what were in many cases peaceful demonstrations/expressions of dissent and/or journalism. Folks who didn't feel personally invested in that cause were often comfortable calling those victims of state terror 'terrorists,' or at least were fine with letting that designation stand. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Maybe this isn't the time to be bringing up these things, but recent events do show, I think, that a tolerance for injustice towards others can end up coming back at you. Will the events of the past few weeks open up people's minds regarding what many of them have been willing to believe were similarly 'unreasonable' demands of other 'marginal' groups in Turkey? I'm not that much of an optimist, but we'll see.

5) Follow the money. That's the case for the media companies, such as Doğuş Holding, which owns a lot of construction interests and doesn't want to miss out on the incredible infrastructure construction that the AKP has undertaken over the past several years (and which is a primary reason for the Turkish economy's growth during this period, austerity-heads!). Money is also, apparently, a big factor in the much-rumored struggle taking place between the AKP and the Gülen cemaat. Americans like to think of these issues in ideological terms. If only it were that simple.

And maybe one silver lining: people are no longer waiting for the Army to act on their behalf. This kind of popular action is unprecedented, at least among the Turkish population of Turkey, since the creation of the Republic. I don't think it is just a coincidence that this is happening at a time when people no longer see the Army as a realistic source of (extra-constitutional) change. Twenty, thirty years ago (or any time before all of the officers were locked up during the Ergenekon trials) a movement like this would have never taken place because the military would have stepped in before ordinary people had a chance to get much involved. If we can see any silver lining in these developments, it's that people are no longer waiting for the military to step in and straighten out the political situation for them.

Keep watching Beşiktaş, not to mention the rest of Turkey. This isn't over.

***Like the Borderlands? You'll love the book! Order your copy now at the OUP website.

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From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review